[To refresh, Part-1 of this series is here. Text in such square brackets is my commentary. Rest of it is a faithful documentation of the most fascinating story ever told of the Quantum Revolution]
At about the same time, in 1960, Soviet Academician Igor Tamm (the Nobel Laureate in Physics) was asked why he did not write his memoirs of all this years of hearing, seeing, experiencing and doing so much in his many years spent in the service of Physics. “What!”, was his caustic reply: “Can you see it in my face that it’s time for me to start writing memoirs?”
[But see, that is the irony of it. We seem to always think, no matter how experienced we get, that we will live for a long LONG time from this point onward. We have so much to to share, each one of us. We hoard all our experience, our insights, our realizations and just like that, in a flash, poof! It’s gone. No one learned from all our stumbles and falls. They have to do it all over again. Makes no sense to me! I’ve decided, no more advice. I will simply share my experience and learning. That’s it. Peeps can decide how they want to use that.]
The first planned interview [to collect the pieces of the story of the Quantum Revolution] was conducted only on February 15th 1962! But it is amazing that in less than two and a half years, on May 18th 1964, the last, one hundred and seventy fifth, interview was completed.
Why is the number of interviews greater than the veterans of the Quantum Revolution? Because some of the interviews took a few days. Werner Heisenberg was the most generous contributor: his twelve interviews to 20 hours, and the transcripts comprises of 300 single spaced typed written pages. Niels Bohr gave five interviews: seven hours of taped conversation. Paul Dirac gave five interviews, Max Born gave three, Robert Oppenheimer gave three… This is why the number of invaluable files in the archive’s safe reached 175.
The historical evidence is quietly waiting for something: one would say — for immortality. But it is better to say modestly that they wait for those increasingly frequent occasions when another historian or author, still under the spell of that sunny mist or having escaped from it, cautiously and yet eagerly reaches for them. A fitting name for it would be that of Proust’s famous work A la recherche du temps perdu, which is loosely translated as “The hunt for the lost time”.
The tape recording reels started spinning and Bohr started spinning the tale of his long road into the unseen depths of matter. Among other things, he remembered how in his student years he had been going to write ‘something on philosophy’. In fact, he was looking for a mathematical solution to the problem of free will. If everything in nature is predetermined and man is not free to choose what to do, any ethical standards are meaningless; since man is not free in his behavior any discussion of conscience and morality is groundless. But if there is free will, how can one reconcile it to the classical determinism according to which everything in nature is governed by absolute necessity? The seventy-seven year old scientist smilingly said that he had been fanciful in hoping to resolve this ancient philosophical puzzle with mathematics.
[But what a student!! A true Scientist. A true Spiritualist! Quietly reflecting on the most profound problems. Sheer brilliance.]
On November 17th 1962, Bohr ended his fifth interview with his recollections of the Copenhagen philosopher Harald Heffding who had been his university teacher. A statue of the Greek goddess of youth, Hebe, stood in Heffding’s house. Bohr recalled a peculiar remark of the old philosopher — he said that he often looked at Hebe to see ‘if she was satisfied with me or not’. Some grave thought of Bohr’s was felt here. Maybe his hidden meaning was whether he, in his turn, who has revealed unknown features of nature and had contributed to our knowledge of it, had earned the gratitude of the young generations?
Next day, November 18th, he suddenly had a headache, went to his room to lie down and peacefully died.
Thus with stunning suddenness another gap appeared in the archive. Now only documents could throw light on what Bohr had not the time to tell. His scientific correspondence consists of more than 6,000 letters! His early papers starting from lecture notes from his university days to the Nobel lecture of 1922 consist of about 6,000 pages. The workers on the project knew that they would never find documents reflecting Bohr’s anti-Nazi activities in the 1930s.
The tape recordings were transcribed. Letters and manuscripts were microfilmed. All the collected documents were copied in triplicate to be kept at three equivalent storage sites of the archive: The library of the University of California (Berkeley), Philosophical Society of America (Philadelphia) and the Nield Bohr Institute (Copenhagen).
The Archive is a 176 large-size paged document densely packed with the names of people, with references, bibliography, geographical names, cryptic abbreviations and so on. It is a fascinating guidebook for mentally travelling through the first 33 years of the 20th century, when the foundations of classical natural science were shattered and the physical concepts of the world were revolutionized. That is why physicists, historians and philosophers agree that these three decades were without parallel in the last three hundred years, since the time of Newton.
Two Beginnings
As the 19th century came to a close, it looked as it it had grown dissatisfied with its well-earned title ‘the age of steam and electricity’ and wanted to stake a claim to the name of the atomic age. And that it did in 1865 with the discovery of X-rays; in 1896, the discovery of radioactivity; and in 1897, the discovery of the electron.
These three discoveries were indeed the sign that a new era was beginning in the natural sciences.
… To be Continued
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